Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Kamailio (OpenSER) Summit 2006 - BoF Session

Birds of a Feather: Kamailio (OpenSER) for Secure and Performant VoIP Environments - was the short session opening the summit on the 7th November. The location was the Expo theater, a hall rather small, targeted for exhibitor's briefings of new services or products.

Since most of our attendees registered from the first day, the seats were not enough, some had to sit on the floor or stand up. This was quite inconvenient for all and we should look for a better organizing in the future.

The scope of BoF was to give a quick shoot about Kamailio (OpenSER), like a preview of the next day, but not only. We tried to bring in discussion concepts, exemplifying with some implementations when was the case.

The moderator was Xavier Casajoana, CEO Voztelecom, who had to talk instead of Jesus Rodrigues as well, who's flight was delayed. Therefore, he presented interesting views over hosted services and how to make such business successful. He underlined that replacement of first voice line is outdated in VoIP and the key is the innovation, to bring adjacent services and applications. Other major benefit of hosted services is the immediate roll out of the service, there is no time needed to set up the VoIP platform, you just have to label an existing one.

Actually the first presentation was about SIP services in distributed environments, by Bogdan-Andrei Iancu. Laying out distribution types in VoIP, his talk focused on reasons and implications of such deployments. What can be distributed and for what reason, when someone should start concerning about distributing his VoIP system and where to look for, all those where spotted in the speech.

The slot about 3/4G and convergence was held by James Tagg, Managing Director Truphone. Already experienced in this area, the Truphone service bringing VoIP to mobile phones is launched in beta stage since VoN Boston, he addressed the benefits for users and the merits of open source IP telephony applications to apply quickly new ideas.

Of course ENUM couldn't miss the debate. The fight for ENUM control delayed its adoption. Klaus Darilion, Enum.at, spoke about new concept of infrastructure ENUM that will enable carriers to apply the requirements they must have is this kind of business.

Ending speech was about peering with heterogeneous networks. Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OpenSER project, revealed numbers about subscriber base of other IM/VoIP networks, motivating why they cannot be ignored or isolated. The solution is to interoperate with them, adding value to your service. The main focus in short term is XMPP interoperability (Jabber,GoogleTalk).

The questions slot started with OpenSER vs. Asterisk. Bogdan cleared it by explaining they are complementary, not overlapping. I presented shortly the steps done so far for an easy integration of Kamailio (OpenSER) and Asterisk, tutorials being available on voip-info.org and dokuwiki from kamailio.org.

Someone insisted in getting a good solution of serving 100 000 000 users with a OpenSER+SS7 system. SS7 is not a primary target for OpenSER as it was designed to work at signaling level, to be hardware independent and not deal with media stream. All panelists gave alternative solutions for such large deployment and technology requirement.

Other question was about Enum's heavy process of adoption. Overall conclusion of Klaus was that improper legislation and the carriers not seeing direct benefits with current standardizations made the adoption rather difficult.